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8. “The Geography of Internal Affairs”: Pioneer Settlement as National Economic Development
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Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous deployment of 1890 census data enshrined the belief that the frontier in the United States was gone. More important , it crystallized a national myth that the western frontier involved the defining experience in “American” history. This was ominous. If democracy and national spirit could no longer be forged anew in the combined geography, economics, history, and idealism of western expansion, Turner worried, where and how could continued expansion and renewal be accomplished ? This sense of national angst that found expression in Turner’s historical geography was equally evident in the national economy of the 1890s. The success of late-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism in the United States had produced an unprecedented economic surplus for which profitable outlets were increasingly scarce. Industrial profits were declining , and unemployment was rising, and the 1893 financial collapse and economic crisis coincided with the publication of Turner’s frontier thesis. The urban working classes were angrier, more organized, and more militant than at any time throughout the fading century, and declining agricultural prices led to heightened agitation and organization on farms as well, especially in the recently settled lands of the upper Midwest and the plains. If in some quarters the crisis of the urban social economy only sharpened the sense of closure of and nostalgia for a lost frontier, the agricultural crisis of the 1890s thwarted any easy appeal to rural redemption. Even as it glorified the past, Turner’s thesis deeply questioned the future. The implications were seri8 “THE GEOGRAPHY OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS”: PIONEER SETTLEMENT AS NATIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ous: the United States was experiencing not simply the end of national geographical expansion but a circumscribed national destiny. Turner understood that the internalized spaces of the republic, especially the cities, had become new sites of Americanization and international “assimilation ,” but the frontier thesis also embodied a more geographical solution to the uncertain future. Why would or should American expansionism obey the constraints imposed by national territorial boundaries? He predicted instead that “American energy will continually demand a wider field of exercise.” Five years after Turner’s dramatic announcement, the U.S. gunboats sailing into the harbors of Manila and Havana seemed to consummate his solution and a new era of political internationalism. Little wonder that such desperate ambition was attached to the “lovely little war.” To the extent that Turner’s ostensibly domestic thesis provided a vital rationale for U.S. foreign involvements from the 1890s until at least the 1920s, it posited a continued reverberation not simply between the eastern cities and the western plains but also between the international and intranational geographies of commerce pursued by the solidifying nation-state.1 Isaiah Bowman’s early career mirrored the expansionist momentum of the turn of the century. When Turner announced the end of the frontier, Bowman was a fourteen-year-old working the land in a region separated from frontier life by little more than a generation. Much of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a mere two hundred miles north of Brown City, still comprised original forest, yet to be clear-cut. If his organization of a local militia in 1898 was the first palpable sign of his own international concerns, these were reaffirmed by his subsequent career: conditional scientific conquest in South America, the international ambition of the Inquiry, the heady politics of Paris, and the liberal American globalism of the Council on Foreign Relations. The expanding scale of his personal involvements interwove neatly with the expansion of American global ambition. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, he also turned his attention to domestic matters. This was unquestionably a retreat. Like all Wilsonian internationalists in this period, he would much rather have been running a powerful League of Nations in Geneva or organizing foreign intelligence in Washington.With foreign affairs largely blocked to his ambition after 1921, he turned to the intersection of science and politics. He rose to the presidency of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the directorship of the Science Advisory Board, and chairmanship of the National Academy of Science’s research wing, the National Research Council. Juggling the American Geographical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and national leadership in science, Bowman also turned back toward geographical 212 / “the geography of internal affairs” [44.200.230.43] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:55 GMT) research. His focus was the same frontier that Turner, three decades earlier, had so eloquently pronounced to be gone, the empire at...